Many companies shy away from Instagram because they aren’t yet comfortable sharing images and short videos. While this is different than sharing text based updates on Twitter and Facebook, once you have a strategy in place everything will come together.

From day one, you’ll want to use an Instagram dashboard for small business to better understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to make positive changes in the future.

Here are three data points that deserve your attention:

1. Followers

It’s not always easy, but you want to see your follower count trending upward.

Even if it’s slow and steady at first – a few new followers per week – the right strategy will eventually lead to a faster pace.

2. Engagement

At first, your goal may be simple: implement a strategy for sharing regular Instagram posts.

While this is a good jumping off point, don’t stop there. There’s more to Instagram success than sharing high quality photos. Engagement is the name of the game.

How many likes are your Instagram posts receiving? How many comments?

Just the same as followers, you hope to see a steady increase over time. Fortunately, as your follower count grows, there’s a greater likelihood of increased engagement.

3. Hashtag Performance

The use of hashtags is one of the best ways to boost your follower count and generate more engagement. Of course, success is based largely on selecting the right hashtags.

With a hashtag leaderboard, you’ll always know which hashtags are associated with the highest level of engagement. This allows you to adjust your usage for better results in the future.

Is your small business spending more time on Instagram? Are you confident in the direction you’re headed? There’s no better time than now to win big with Instagram. This could do wonders for your company!

“Instagram has doubled its user base, to 700 million monthly actives in two years, fueled by Stories, web signups and better onboarding on low-end Android phones. Instagram’s growth rate is actually speeding up. It took just four months to add the last 100 million users since hitting 600 million in December, while it took six months to go from 500 million to 600 million.”

What do you think about that?

While many people use Instagram for personal reasons – such as posting photos of their travels – it’s the companies that know what they’re doing that have been able to take full advantage of this growth.

With this in mind, there’s no better time than now to get in touch with your Instagram analytics. While there are plenty of KPIs to track, these three are among the most important to your brand’s growth:

1. Followers

This is what it’s all about. In a perfect world, your follower count would grow day after day. Even if growth slows, you want to see an upward trend from month to month.

2. Engagement

It’s nice to know that your follower count is increasing, but you don’t want to put all your eggs in this basket. There is more to Instagram than a large follower count. You need to dig deeper than that, and this is where engagement comes into play.

With Dasheroo, you can “view a rolling total of likes and comments for your posts in the given time period.”

3. Hashtag Performance

If you want to increase your follower count and engagement, it’s imperative to know how each hashtag is performing.

We make this simple by providing data on the following:

Hashtag

Likes

Comments

Engagement rate

Final Thoughts

Instagram could be the key to taking your brand’s social media presence to the next level.

If you’re not yet using this fast growing platform, now’s the time to get started. Once you have everything in order, create an Instagram dashboard and start tracking the KPIs detailed above (among others).

Of course, there is more to Instagram than posting photos, adding a few hashtags, and waiting for your audience to engage. Just the same as any social media platform, your success is based largely on the strategy you employ.

When it comes to Instagram analytics, you need to know what drives your business. Is your audience interested in a particular type of content? Is one hashtag consistently outperforming the rest?

You can answer these questions – among many others – by tracking Instagram analytics via your Dasheroo business dashboard.

What’s important to your brand may not be important to another company. Fortunately, we make it easy to track almost everything associated with your Instagram account.

For example, engagement rate is a metric that deserves your constant attention. We define this as follows:

“View the engagement rate of your Instagram account and how it trends over time.”

Taking this one step further, you can track the posts with the highest engagement. We use this formula to generate a list of posts with the highest engagement rate:

“Engagement rate = Comments + Likes ÷ Followers”

When it comes to Instagram analytics, you need to see more than numbers. You need to know what these numbers mean, as every piece of data allows you to adjust your approach with the idea of generating better results in the future.

Are you using Instagram to boost your brand? Do you understand what’s working and what’s not? Using an Instagram dashboard could be the difference between success and failure in the future!